


Poison in the wine

by coffeeandoranges



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Jealousy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 06:11:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20652491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeeandoranges/pseuds/coffeeandoranges
Summary: There are parts of you missing,she thinks, watching his chest rise and fall.I will find out which ones.





	Poison in the wine

**Author's Note:**

> Yet another 'processing season 8' ficlet. I'm sorry, I'll stop soon. Content warnings for dubious consent and gaslighting apply here.

She never has him. She starts losing him from the beginning, in bits and pieces, he’s leaving himself behind in her bed and taking himself away every morning, leaving curls of dark hair in their shared furs, leaving behind the ache between her thighs, leaving— and she doesn’t know better than to chase something that wants to be gone. 

The smallfolk sing of the Black Bastard and his queen; unflattering songs. It undercuts her, she knows, to be a woman, to be begging for love, to be that instead of a queen; to beg instead of demand. But she loves him too much to demand. 

Trying to love him, she takes the braids out of her hair and pretends to be shy, to be a maid, as they say in the Seven Kingdoms. 

If anything the pretense makes his touch linger less. His eyes have the Wall in them, she’s coming to know the look, icy and infinite and gray. He tells her she doesn’t have to pretend. He says it with a gentle tone, touching her arm. But he is pretending all the time. 

She doesn’t know what his pretending hides. 

Her fingers map out each limb and every scar where a knife or an arrow ever bit into his flesh. 

Jon Snow is the warrior she would imagine in bed with Daario Naharis. The memory of Daario’s body calls up Jon’s– the lines of them shaped by warfare, his body formed similar to Jon Snow’s, like a coastline bleeding into the sea; the suggestion of the thing, the thing itself.

“You were promised to me in a dream,” she says, teasing him. She touches the corner of his mouth, where a smile would be if he ever smiled. His smiles are all the promises she ever gets. _ All I wanted was what was promised. _

“Your face was a shifting shadow,” she says, after they have made love. When he falls asleep she dreams that he is falling through her hands like sand. First his legs, then his torso, then his strong shoulders. Then the smile he almost never gives, the most incorporeal of all. His heart. 

She lets herself dream. 

For all he takes away, she gives. She lets him call her_ Dany, _ he sees her without her braids, she uses her warm true voice with him, instead of the voice she first used on the Great Grass Sea. At night, he rides on top of her like she was any woman other than his rightful queen. 

She even asks him if he has ever thought of marriage for himself; he responds with a long pause. Then says, “I never did.” 

“The boy will come around,” Tyrion promises her. He means their political alliance. He knows nothing of her heart. The moment Jon Snow appeared, something between Queen and Hand twisted and stretched and snapped; they are picking up the pieces. They spend hours in her solar discussing the movements of armies. Dany is not paying attention. “Go to him,” Tyrion snaps at her at last, and she leaves the solar hiding tears– the kind that gather and take her by surprise; that she can even feel like a child again is a kind of grace. 

Jon is asleep in their furs with Ghost at the foot of their bed. 

She thinks of his things as their things, his room as their room. If anyone has earned such delusion it is her. She feels too old, for every time she feels too young. She remembers hunger and rage. She remembers Viserys’s hands on her breasts– just as she takes Jon’s hands now and places them on her hips. He blinks at her, his eyes just waking up. She watches to see what sliver of emotion flickers across his face for the first half second he is awake. What his instinct is when he looks at her. She sees little of the wolf, less than she expects, and more of the prey. 

“Did I frighten you, my love?” She has climbed on top of him after all; as he drifts into awareness, the first feeling he has is of being pinned down by her body, of his hands placed on her hips when he didn’t put them there. 

She is closer to making demands. 

“No,” he says. She can see the lie in the shadow that passes over his grey eyes. 

She lets him rest. 

She wants to be good to him. _He is good to me,_ she thinks, curled into herself beside him, a spiral of her own regret. As good as he can be. 

The wolf in him returns without warning. 

He does want her, she just never gets to choose when. Sudden fire comes into his eyes, and his mouth opens against hers, with his strength against hers, he lays her down on the bed and they’re joined again, flesh against flesh– but he is shaking when he washes up onshore. He lays that head of black curls on her belly. She winds her fingers in his hair.

“Why did you come back?” she asks him. 

“You’re in my blood, Dany. I can’t explain any more than that.” 

_ There are parts of you missing, _ she thinks, watching his chest rise and fall. _ I will find out which ones. _She dreams again, of Jon slipping through her hands, melting like snow. 

She senses absence in their bed. Or a presence— there are shapes between them, vapor between in and out breaths. Something is there with them. Dany wants to know nothing so much as who she is, this other woman in their bed. She questions him one night about it, after he’s collapsed on her chest. She thinks she heard another name in his mouth— he murmurs a sound she cannot quite hear. 

He breaks down and tells her about Ygritte. 

She is a wilding girl, he says, and dead. 

He doesn’t use the word_ love _. 

This is enough for now. The dragon settles back into her chest. 

Until Winterfell. 

Until there is Sansa, with her red hair– a lovely figure even shrouded in linen and wool. Sansa who grew up with Jon, who knows him better than Dany ever will. Sansa. This is the name she heard, it must be. Even her name is light as gossamer; Dany will never be as light.

Still, she watches for proof; she will not lower herself to accusations. She holds her wolf by the ears, ready to bolt. One twitch will send him running. And later one day, at a war council with Starks stacked shoulder-to-shoulder on either side of the table— there’s so bloody many of them— she watches each long solemn face to see what it might give away. There are looks passed from one to the other. Arya to Jon, Sansa to Bran, Arya to Sansa— and back around again. Dany waits for the loop to close. For Sansa to look at Jon; for them to look at each other, and then she will know. 

But they never do. 

Sansa turns to Arya instead, and Jon gets up to follow Tyrion. 

Samwell Tarly rolls up the maps. 

“Your Grace,” Tyrion says, smiling. “If I were you, I’d watch for poison in my wine.” He lifts his cup to her, as if to say, _ Taste it. _

She never does, until the end. 


End file.
